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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange Arrested in London

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the staff of the Ridgewood blog

London UK, Police were seen outside the Ecuadorian embassy after WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was arrested by British police in London, Britain yesterday.

A lawyer for whistleblower Julian Assange has confirmed that he has been arrested partly in relation to a request for extradition from the United States.Writing on Twitter, Jen Robinson said Assange’s arrest in London was “not just for breach of bail conditions but also in relation to a US extradition reques.”

Continue reading WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange Arrested in London
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Assange : Source For WikiLeaks Was Not Russian Government

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January 3,2017

the staff of the Ridgewood blog

Ridgewood NJ, Julian Assange tells Sean Hannity the source for WikiLeaks was not Russian government.In an exclusive interview with FOX News Channel’s Sean Hannity the founder of WikiLeaks Julian Assange said Russia was not the source for the DNC and John Podesta hacks.

HANNITY: Can you say to the American people, unequivocally, that you did not get this information about the DNC, John Podesta’s emails, can you tell the American people 1,000 percent that you did not get it from Russia or anybody associated with Russia?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Yes. We can say, we have said, repeatedly that over the last two months that our source is not the Russian government and it is not a state party.

Hannity’s full interview with Assange will air Tuesday night at 10pm ET. More from the interview:

ASSANGE: Our publications had wide uptake by the American people, they’re all true. But that’s not the allegation that’s being presented by the Obama White House. So, why such a dramatic response? Well, the reason is obvious. They’re trying to delegitimize the Trump administration as it goes into the White House. They are trying to say that President-elect Trump is not a legitimate President…

ASSANGE: Our source is not a state party, so the answer for our interactions is no. But if we look at our most recent statement from the US government, which is on the 29th of December, OK, we had five different branches of government, Treasury, DHS, FBI, White House presenting their accusations to underpin Obama’s throwing out 29 Russian diplomats. What was missing from all of those statements? The word WikiLeaks. It’s very strange.

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WikiLeaks Supporters Stage Massive Cyber Attack on US

Wikileaks_founder_Julian_Assange_theridgewoodblog

October 22,2016

the staff of the Ridgewood blog

Ridgewood NJ , The NYT reported yesterday that major websites were inaccessible to people across many parts of the United States on Friday after a company that manages crucial parts of the internet’s infrastructure said it was under attack.

Waves of cyber attacks brought down many popular websites Friday, leaving millions of users without access and the Department of Homeland Security investigating the precise cause.

Users reported problems reaching several websites, including Twitter, Netflix, Spotify, Airbnb, Reddit, Etsy, SoundCloud and The New York Times.This just a little over a month after the US Internet Giveaway to the U.N. and days after the Obama administration attempted  to take Julian Assange founder of WikiLeaks off the internet.

This just a little over a month after the US Internet giveaway to the U.N. and days after the Obama administration attempted  to take Julian Assange founder of WikiLeaks off the internet.

The attack, which is believed to be a coordinated effort, targeted a single Domain Name Server provider called Dyn. Dyn’s servers monitor and reroute internet traffic. The attack started just around 7am and is known as a distributed denial of service attack, or DDoS. No information is obtained with DDoS attacks, they create major frustration. The DDoS attack affected Dyn’s infrastructure that supports internet connections, meaning the attack did not affect websites themselves. Instead, it blocked or slowed users from gaining access to sites.

According to the NYT , the attack appears to have relied on hundreds of thousands of internet-connected devices like cameras, baby monitors and home routers that have been infected — without their owners’ knowledge — with software that allows hackers to command them to flood a target with overwhelming traffic.

WikiLeaks believes its supporters were responsible and it urged its supporters to ‘stop taking down the US internet’, saying ‘Mr Assange is still alive and WikiLeaks is still publishing’.

It then tweeted: ‘The Obama administration should not have attempted to misuse its instruments of state to stop criticism of its ruling party candidate.’

The Ridgewood Blog remained largely unaffected which was a great relief to both the staff and our IT department . Giving past attempts to take down the site by some politicians , local and otherwise and foreign governments ,founder James Foytlin aka PJ blogger said ,”it’s nice to be left out of the fray” . Other staff members postulated that perhaps a more open posture to Wikileaks had left the (Ridgewood)blog unscathed.
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How Julian Assange Turned WikiLeaks Into Trump’s Best Friend

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Can a lonely man in a tiny bedroom deliver a real October Surprise?

Max Chafkin
and
Vernon Silver
October 11, 2016 — 6:00 AM EDT

Julian Assange is 45 years old and, if an old online dating profile is to be believed, roughly 6 feet, 2 inches tall. He has soft features, prematurely silver hair, and skin that seems to border on translucent. This undercooked appearance is the result of more than four years of self-imposed confinement in a tiny bedroom in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. He has little access to sunlight, few in-person companions—or really much of anything going on, except what’s on the internet.

The founder of the online publishing platform WikiLeaks was the world’s best-known activist hacker when he walked into the modest row house in 2012, applying for humanitarian asylum rather than face questioning in Sweden over accusations of rape and sexual molestation. He claimed the case had been ginned up by the U.S., which, he believes, has been secretly trying to have him extradited for much of the past decade. The U.S. opened a criminal investigation into WikiLeaks after the organization published hundreds of thousands of leaked State Department cables in 2010. Although he has not been formally charged, Assange has often implied—without much hard evidence—that the U.S. would gladly try to assassinate him.

So it wasn’t entirely surprising last week when, on the occasion of WikiLeaks’s 10-year anniversary, Assange abruptly cancelled a planned appearance on the embassy’s balcony, citing security concerns. Instead he opted to appear, Oz-like, via video at a heavily hyped press conference held in Berlin. The Oct. 4 event had been announced for the Volksbühne, a grand old playhouse that seats 800, but when guests began showing up just before 10 a.m., the entrance was locked.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-11/how-julian-assange-turned-wikileaks-into-trump-s-best-friend

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Assange vows Google, US election leaks as WikiLeaks turns 10

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The whistleblowing site was founded in 2006 by Julian Assange, who today said he “feels sorry” for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

Controversial website WikiLeaks began spilling secrets 10 years ago, and there’s more to come.

In coming weeks, the site is set to publish documents related to Google, the US presidential election and more, according to controversial founder Julian Assange.

A video showing the top 10 leaks on the site today opened a press conference marking the 10th anniversary of the whistleblower site, in which time it has published 10 million documents. Assange promised new information every week for the next 10 weeks, related to Google, military operations, arms trading and mass surveillance. He also promised all documents related to the US presidential election would be published before the vote on November 8.

https://www.cnet.com/news/assange-10-years-of-wikileaks-berlin/

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Julian Assange: ‘A lot more material’ coming on US elections

Hillary Clinton

By Matthew Chance, CNN

Updated 4:16 PM ET, Tue July 26, 2016

(CNN)Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said Tuesday his whistleblowing website might release “a lot more material” relevant to the US electoral campaign.

Assange was speaking in a CNN interview following the release of nearly 20,000 emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee by suspected Russian hackers.

However, Assange refused to confirm or deny a Russian origin for the mass email leak, saying Wikileaks tries to create ambiguity to protect all its sources.

“Perhaps one day the source or sources will step forward and that might be an interesting moment some people may have egg on their faces. But to exclude certain actors is to make it easier to find out who our sources are,” Assange told CNN.

The Kremlin has rejected allegations its behind the hacking, calling suggestions it ordered the release of the emails to influence US politics the “usual fun and games” of the US election campaigns.
“This is not really good for bilateral relations,” Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, added.

https://www.cnn.com/2016/07/26/politics/julian-assange-dnc-email-leak-hack/

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Julian Assange On TPP: Only 5 Of 29 Sections Are About “Traditional Trade,” Covers “Essentially Every Aspect Of A Modern Economy”

Wikileaks_founder_Julian_Assange_theridgewoodblog

Speaking from his ‘prison’ in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange explains the Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty, which would link his home country of Australia with the U.S. economically. “It is mostly not about trade,” Assange says. “Only 5 of the 29 Chapters are about traditional trade.”

JULIAN ASSANGE, WIKILEAKS: First of all, it is the largest ever international economic treaty that has ever been negotiated, very considerably larger than NAFTA. It is mostly not about trade, only 5 of the 29 Chapters are about traditional trade.

The others are about regulating the internet, and what information internet service providers have to collect, they have to hand it over to companies under certain circumstances, the regulation of labor conditions, regulating the way you can favor local industry, regulating the hospital, health care system, privatization of hospitals, so essentially every aspect of a modern economy, even banking services are in the TPP.

So that is erecting and embedding new ultramodern neoliberal structure over U.S. law and the laws of other countries. And putting it in treaty form.

By putting it in a treaty form, there are 14 countries involved, that means it is very hard to overturn, so if there is a desire, a democratic desire to do it on a different path. For example, to introduce more public transport. Then you can’t easily change the TPP treaty, because you have to go back to the other nations involved.

Now looking at that example, what if the government or a state government decides it wants to build a hospital somewhere, and there is a private hospital has been erected nearby.

Well the TPP gives the constructor of the private hospital the right to sue the government over the expect loss, the loss in expected future profits. This is an expected future loss, this is not an actual loss that has been sustained, this is a claim about the future.

We know from similar instruments where governments can be sued over free trade treaties, that that is used to construct a chilling effect on environmental and health regulation laws. For example, Togo, Australia, Uruguay are all being sued by tobacco company Phillip Morris to prevent them from introducing health warnings on cigarette packaging…

It is not even an even playing field, lets say you were going to let companies, make it easier for companies to sue governments, maybe that is right, maybe the government is too powerful and companies should have the right to sue them in certain circumstances.

But it is only multinationals that get this right. U.S. companies that operate in the U.S. in relation to investments that happen in the U.S. will not have this right.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2015/05/28/julian_assange_on_tpp_only_5_of_29_sections_are_about_traditional_trade_essentially_every_aspect_of_a_modern_economy.html